Friday, 31 January 2014

Redesigning Your Website

Often your website is the first impression of your business.
This can be based exclusively on your website…therefore we know redesigning
your website isn’t a task that your take lightly. It requires a good deal of
thought, time, and potentially money, but the upside can be enormous.

It’s important to note here that "redesign"
doesn’t necessarily mean you need to change every single element on your
website. In fact, redesigns can just mean making functional modifications that
help your website work better and assist you in reaching your marketing and
sales goals. After all, your website is one of the foundational elements of
your business strategy.

There are a few steps in redesigning and some
considerations, but the benefits can be rewarding for your brand and business.

Dye Your Hair Colour,
or Get A Full Make-Over?

Sometimes, websites only need a few minimal changes to make
it look modern. Just a tweak here, and a tweak there and you’d be surprised the
difference it can make! But you may be looking to include some new features, or
maybe your website has aged like a sun-tanning enthusiast and needs a
transformation that would rival most Reality TV Make-Over shows. This all
really depends on what you’re trying to achieve and what shape your website is
currently in. it may just need a change in colour, and an engaging function
like a homepage rotator, and some websites will need to start from scratch as
there isn’t worth salvaging anything.

Have Your Cake and
Eat It Too

Have a bit of a look in to your website, and think about
what features have been successful. Maybe you have been great at getting people
on to your website and browsing information, but just haven’t quite been able
to land many catches and have them leaving contact details for you to follow
them up. In this case, you want to change the design to make your call to
action (Sign up, free quote etc.) more prominent and easier for the user to
fill out. It might not have anything to do with placement at all, but merely a
dauntingly long contact form.

Once you have figured out what features have worked, and
what hasn’t you can determine what features you can keep, and what needs
tweaking to be successful on the new website. Now we combine these ingredients
with new features that are being released, as well as features that were
previously non-existent. Now we’re on to a winner!

Have Objectives

If your objective is ‘to make the website look nice’, you’re
doing it wrong.

It’s all well and good having a ‘nice’ looking website, but
it needs to be an effective website if you want to see a return on your
investment. Don’t get me wrong, a ‘nice’ looking website in most cases will
help in creating an effective website. But you need to delve further, don’t
just go skin deep. Create objectives that are specific, measurable, achievable,
relevant and time-bound (SMART), as these will help you analyse how successful
the project was.

Let’s look at an effective objective:

“I will increase my
conversion rate on website leads to attain contact details by an average of 15%
within 6 months of launching my new website.”

Now let’s break it down:

Specific: this objective is concerning
increasing their conversions on leads. In this sense they want to capture more
contact details to follow up with, or use in marketing promotions.

Measurable: the results can be measured as you
can track these and use numbers to make assessments. They have also stated a
desired percentage increase to judge the results.

Achievable: 15% is a respectable increase. It’s
motivating in that it is a significant improvement, but it is not an increase
that is too difficult to attain that it is de-motivating and counter-productive
– you want to dangle the carrot far in enough in front so you think you can
reach it, but you still have to work hard to get there.

Relevant: The objective is relevant in that
achieving this, will improve the profitability of the business.

Time-bound: a time-limit has been set in which
the objective needs to be achieved, as this helps make the objective measurable
and assessable.

It’s also important to have multiple objectives, relating to
the different parts of the business you want to improve. You could have an
objective for website hits, another for conversions, another for sales etc.

Does this Website
Help Complete the Puzzle?

Marketers often refer to your overall marketing strategy as
a puzzle. All the different channels and mediums help create a big picture of
how you are perceived and positioned in the market. Your website is obviously
one of your most important pieces of this marketing puzzle, as it is one of the
most frequently used touch-points for your customers, and is used to base many
consumer decisions, so it’s important that your website fits well into your
marketing puzzle. Does it accurately reflect your business and your branding?
Does it help you achieve your business goals? All in all, is it working
consistently and complimenting your other marketing efforts?

Consider Market Needs
and Trends

It’s something that business owners should constantly be
doing, but they’re particularly important in the ever-evolving world of
websites. You firstly must need to
consider the needs of your target market, to make the user experience as
comfortable and enjoyable as possible. For instance, if your target market is
young children for an educational website, you will need to factor in how easy
the website is to use and navigate. Think big, bright buttons, minimal text,
and a very easy-to-follow structure and workflow.

Now think about a business like a Marketing Firm, and what
information their customers would want. The high priority information they are
after are: Their reputation, their services and some case studies. So this
information needs to be prominent and accessible!

Now let’s think about the evolving world of technology and
websites. It’s common knowledge that websites date quite quickly because of all
of the changes in technology, so it’s important you know where the world of
websites is heading, so get ahead of the curve and make sure your website is
valid for as long as possible.

Right now there are two major trends: Responsive Design and
parallax scrolling.

Responsive design is all about having the one website scale
and adjust depending on the screen being used to view the website, to make sure
it works optimally. Then there’s the parallax scrolling feature, this is all
about design.

We’ve Rebuilt your
House, Now we Need to Furnish it!

The biggest mistake you can make, is to invest time and
money into getting a brand new website that looks amazing and has all the bells
and whistles you need on it, but the images and text just don’t add anything.
This is more obvious in terms of images, I mean it’s so easy to make a website
look nice with high-quality, relevant images, and it’s so easy to ruin a web
design with poor ones.

Take a bit of extra time to consider your content and
images, because you will see unimaginable results!

This concludes our series on rebranding; often a very
daunting task but it can also be a very rewarding one also when done correctly.
Hopefully these tips and tricks will help you along the way, and remember, we’re
always here to chat and give advice when needed!